Do you measure space monsters in meters or feet?

A couple days ago I was happily typing away at my space opera scifi novel in my favorite coffee shop, sipping on my chai latte, when my hero, Dirken Nova, saw a massive alien emerge from a tunnel....

Grimmag Ruby-Eye was the largest Eradini that Dirken had ever seen. He was easily twenty five feet long and perhaps ten feet wide. Like others of his species, he was basically a giant maggot with a wide, tubular body that wobbled as if filled with jelly.

But wait....  I stopped typing and read back over that bit. Something bothered me about it. Well, besides comparing an alien to jelly....

And then I realized. I was measuring this beastly alien using the English (Imperial) system. But isn't this a scifi novel set a thousand years from now?? Shouldn't it be a bit more scientific? Shouldn't it be metric?? Shouldn't that be eight meters long by three meters wide? (I'm rounding the value, here).

I'm a scientist by day. I work in the metric system all day long. It just makes sense. Everything is a base-ten and easy to convert between units. Well, except maybe for cooking.

Yet I'm from the United States and, according to my blog stats, the majority of you reading this blog are from the United States as well. The U.S. hasn't yet fully adopted the metric system for some inane reason. It's in lonely company, along with Liberia and Myanmar. If I say that something is three meters long, most of my fellow Americans would scratch their head and puzzle over what that would look like, maybe getting their cell phones out to look it up.

So I got some other opinions. I ran a poll on Twitter (Twitter's great for that!). And the response was overwhelming....

As you see, "metric" won the lion's shares of votes at 64%.

I think the most compelling argument that people made in the comments is that this is the future and science fiction readers are more likely to be fluent with science measurements, which are almost always metric.

One Twitter follower (ScifiFan) pointed out that a meter is not the same on Earth as on Mars, but it turns out he was using the old definition (originally, a meter was defined as "one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole," which would certainly be different on different planets. But later it was redefined as "the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second." (Wikipedia) That's an easy number to remember, right?

So I'll go with metric.

As another Twitter follower (Benjamin W. Bass @TheDarkRabbit) commented:

In space, no one can hear you divide by 12....

Cheers and happy reading!